Death…

I don’t want to get into what death really is, or what lies beyond death. I just want to talk about what it means to those who get left behind. To them, it means simply that their loved one has been lost forever...

How do you measure these things? How do you understand what goes through a five year old boy who lends his shoulder to lift his father’s coffin? How does that compare that to an aging man who loses the son he’s adored from the moment he was born? How does a woman whose world revolved around her husband feel when he dies and leaves her alone like she’d never imagined?

Losing someone you love – friend, parent, sibling, spouse – to distance or circumstance is hard enough. But losing someone irrevocably to death kills you. Well no – the hard part is that it doesn’t kill you. It hurts enough to kill, and yet you have no choice but to live on.

If death is inevitable, then why do we allow ourselves to love someone so? If love is inevitable, then why doesn’t it die when the one you love does?